Everything is amazing
Via Alan at SnarkyBytes comes this video on perspective amd education in the 21st century. I was going to leave this comment there but it got a little out of control.
It seems to me that some of the conclusions drawn by the writers of the video do not necessarily follow from the data, or that they are not as significant as the video makes them out to be. Example: The video states that half the information learned by freshman students enrolled in a four-year technical program will be obsolete by their junior year because the amount of new technical information is doubling every two years. I can’t agree with this conclusion because these students are learning the basics during their first two years, and arguably during their entire four years of education. The mathematics and physics that an undergraduate student in a technical field learns will probably not be obsolete during his or her entire lifetime, let alone after two years of education. The same is true of the fundamentals of design and problem-solving. Even for a degree program in a very rapidly evolving field such as computer science, the basics of logical programming and object-oriented languages are useful, even fundamental, even if the languages you learn become obsolete. Also, new information does not necessarily (or usually) invalidate old information.
Likewise, haven’t we always been expecting our students to solve problems never previously considered, and to do so with new technology? Did physics students in the 1920s expect to go on to develop weapons capable of killing millions of people? Did they expect to use room-sized computers to make those weapons possible? Did engineers of the 1940s expect that during their lifetime they would be able to ditch their slide rules and solve even calculus problems with an electronic computer that fit in their pockets? Moreover, that students a generation or two later might not even learn how to use a slide rule?
This is not to say that the times we live in are not amazing. I’m just not sure that they’re more amazing than any other time since the industrial revolution. It’s difficult for me to put modern technological advancements in perspective with past innovations, and based on videos like this one I don’t think I’m alone. In the last 110 years we’ve come from a time with no powered flight to a permanent human presence in outer-fucking-space. Space flight right now is so unremarkable to so many people that shuttle launches barely make the newspaper. Space travel didn’t even get a mention in the linked video.
A century and a half ago an overland trip from Philadelphia to San Francisco took nearly a year and there was a 1 in 20 chance that you would perish from illness during the trip. Today you can make the trip in six hours by flying through the sky and you have a greater chance of being killed by lightning than by any travel-related mishap. 60 years ago if you moved from one continent to another you traveled via ship and the trip took you at least a week. Today a family can be on the other side of the planet in less than 24 hours.
I’ll leave off with one of my favorite videos on the matter of technological advances and perspective. I wish I could remember where I found this: